During the filming for the 1982 film on William Burroughs, Arena followed him to the home and studio of old friend Francis Bacon, where he drops in for a cup of tea and a catch up. This meeting has never been broadcast, and this clip is shown uncut as the pair discuss their views on painting.
Directed by Howard Brookner and Nigel Finch
Series Editor – Anthony Wall
citato già altre volte: “(…) Burroughs criticism has taken a surprisingly conventional literary approach to a project conceived so radically in opposition to the conventions of literature. The analysis of Burroughs’ novel-length cut-up texts has been at the expense of his myriad shorter texts from the same era, texts that, taken together, amount to a comparable body of work and demonstrate a much wider range of collage-based experiments. Even leaving aside his related work in other media — photomontage, collage scrap-books, tape-recordings, films — the effect of putting The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express centre-stage is to distort the history and scope of Burroughs’ experimental practices. Minutes to Go does not fit the critical frame because it inaugurated and belongs to another history, one characterised by publication of hundreds of short texts in dozens of small underground magazines — a history, in other words, where the material, the publishing contexts, and the means of distribution all coincided with the world of avant-garde poetry in general, and the postwar revival of collage-based techniques in particular. It’s tempting to invert critical history altogether and say that, far from being the acme of Burroughs’ cut-up work, the trilogy is in fact its aberration, because the truest realisation of the project lay outside the novel form. At the very least, we can say that it is hard to grasp the poetic identity of the cut-up project so long as Burroughs is approached, first and last, as a novelist”. (Oliver Harris, https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/burroughs-is-a-poet-too-really-the-poetics-of-minutes-to-go/)
è abbastanza chiaro? OUTSIDE THE NOVEL FORM.
si può seguire questa direzione? è legittimo. (a prescindere da tutto e tutti).
citare o mettersi sulla stessa strada di Burroughs, o su una strada che in qualsiasi modo abbia a che fare con la sua opera, è (soprattutto adesso) lavorare OUTSIDE THE NOVEL FORM.
In questo video, uno stralcio della presentazione fatta da Primo Moroni – al Festival di Santarcangelo di Romagna nel 1991 – del documentario William S. Burroughs. Commissioner of Sewers, di Klaus Maeck, e una lettura in italiano della Thanksgiving Prayer di WSB diretta da G. Van Sant.
During the recording for the 1982 film on William Burroughs (the resulting programme airing in the UK on 22nd February 1983), Arena followed him to the home and studio of old friend Francis Bacon, where he drops in for a cup of tea and a catch up. This meeting has never been fully broadcast, and the clip is supposedly shown uncut as the pair discuss their views on painting.
This unofficial, Fair Use/Fair Dealings compilation by Barrington Arts also includes all other related footage from that day in 1982 that has ever been publicly leaked.
This unauthorised edit also includes a soundtrack of COIL tracks recorded in the same period as the film footage (1982-83).
The majority of the footage here was directed by Howard Brookner and Nigel Finch.